


These Days

by aces



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who: Eighth Doctor Adventures - Various Authors
Genre: Academy Era, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-18
Updated: 2008-12-18
Packaged: 2017-11-28 03:57:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/670003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aces/pseuds/aces
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Flowers and hermits and picnics, oh my.</p>
            </blockquote>





	These Days

Theta smiled in his sleep. Just a tiny little thing, more a quirk of his lips than anything, but he was smiling in his sleep, and there were leaves in his hair and a grass stain on his left cheek.

Koschei took another drink from his beer—a homebrew they’d swiped from Theta’s House—and propped himself on one elbow, the better to watch his friend. The sun was low, turning the usual dusky orange sky by turns gold, and red, and umber. The breeze was cool, too cool; seasons were changing, and they would never have known if they hadn’t left the dome.

The breeze shifted across Theta, blew a strand of too-long blond hair across his forehead. He scrunched his face and lifted a lazy hand to tuck the hair away, all without ever opening his eyes. His skin was pale, untouched by the sun for too long.

Koschei hadn’t really liked the idea of breaking out originally, but now he could definitely see its merits. Even if when they got back Lord Borusa made them clean out every single chronon scrubber in every single TARDIS with their bare hands. Which he would do, too, if he discovered they’d left the Capitol.

Koschei sighed and drained his beer. He set the bottle down, noticing one last little white wildflower left in the grass. He couldn’t remember what they were called. He grinned to himself and plucked the flower.

As quietly as he could manage, he crept closer to his friend. The breeze had dropped, the sun as well, leaving them in near-darkness but for a shaft of brilliant red light across the horizon, opposite the mountains. Theta looked darker in this light, darker and more solid than he had looked for days.

It would be a shame to wake him, really.

That didn’t mean Koschei wasn’t going to enjoy doing it anyway.

He trailed the tiny, delicate petals of the flower along Theta’s cheek. Up over his forehead, down along next to his eye, back to his cheek. Theta twitched, his forehead scrunching up again. He didn’t move a hand, though, or open his eyes. Koschei let the flower drag along his friend’s chin, nose, his lips.

Theta’s eyes popped open, _blue_. Koschei stopped moving the flower. 

Theta had this trick where he liked to try to stop time. Without a TARDIS, that is, or any of the other usual equipment any practical Time Lord would use to do so; but Theta wasn’t quite a Time Lord yet, and nobody had ever yet accused him of being practical. He had tried to explain it to Koschei and Ushas once, while particularly drunk, and they had mostly been distracted by his emphatic hand gestures, particularly when those gestures almost smacked them in the forehead or shoulder or chin. Actually, when one almost hit Ushas in the breast, she almost broke Theta’s hand, and that had pretty much ended the conversation.

Koschei thought maybe Theta had finally gotten the trick right because the breeze seemed to have stopped, and everything had gone silent but for their breathing. He could hear Theta’s heart beating, or maybe his own, or maybe both, echoes of future heartsbeats, and Koschei suddenly wondered for the first time where they would be three hundred years from now.

Theta smiled at the flower, then at Koschei, and then he sat up and tucked the little white flower behind his ear. “You’ve never met my hermit, have you?” he asked, standing up with an astonishing amount of energy for a man who had just been snoring in a field.

“You have a hermit?” Koschei squinted up at him, trying to see his friend’s face in the dark.

“My father does; they were apparently fashionable a century or four ago,” Theta shrugged. He held out a hand. “I’ll introduce you to him.”

Koschei let his friend help him up, if only so he could frown at the other man from the same eye level. He fingered his new beard, a habit he was trying to kick himself out of. “It’s awfully late, Thete,” he said cautiously. “We really ought to get back before they notice we’re not working on that time dilation experiment—”

“Oh, hush,” Theta cut him off impatiently. “They fully expect us to have contrived to mess it up and got stuck in it, and they’ll expect us to extricate ourselves from it approximately two days from now. Self-righteous wankers, the lot of them,” he added in a mutter with a glare over Koschei’s shoulder at the dome.

Koschei twisted his neck to look over his shoulder as well and grimaced. He turned back to Theta. “Hermit it is,” he said with a grin, and Theta’s scowl melted into his own grin as he snatched Koschei’s hand and started pulling him toward the mountains, away from the dome. 

They both remembered it for decades and centuries afterward as one of the best days of their lives.

*

_The odd four or nine centuries later, subjectively speaking_

*

Fitz felt a bit ridiculous. He’d gotten somewhat used to that feeling over the past few years, however, so he was able to shrug it off with relative ease as he watched the Doctor perform some arcane magic with a checked blanket, a basket that was surely a mini-TARDIS, and an absurd amount of food and drink.

“Doctor?” Anji asked, also scrutinizing the Doctor’s antics, with more scepticism and less amusement than Fitz. “Why are we having a picnic?”

“Why does anyone have a picnic?” the Doctor asked, and Fitz thought it was a pretty reasonable question. He looked at Anji inquiringly. She rolled her eyes at him.

“At least it’s a nice day for it,” Fitz said, looking around. The Doctor had managed to find a planet full of rolling green hills and forests and birds but no people. Or insects, he had assured his friends. “What about ants?” Anji had asked, and the Doctor had shaken his head again, though Fitz rather thought he’d been hiding crossed fingers behind his back.

“The breeze is always just right,” said the Doctor as he laid the checked blanket down on the earth, “and the sun shall set spectacularly in approximately four hours. It usually does.”

Fitz and Anji exchanged glances again. “We’re not still in the TARDIS, are we?” Anji asked him in a low voice. “Somehow we didn’t _notice_ not leaving through the front door?”

“I don’t know,” Fitz replied. “Wouldn’t put it past him, though.”

“No, Anji, we are not still in the TARDIS,” the Doctor said as he started pulling plates and silverware and dishes of food and carafes of tea and alcohol and juice out of the bigger-on-the-inside basket. “The Eye of Orion is just a wonderfully unusual and hospitable planet.”

“Oh, of course,” Fitz said in relief.

“What?” Anji frowned and brushed a lock of hair behind her ear.

“Eye of Orion,” Fitz explained. “He’s always going on about the place; I guess he finally decided it was time to take us here.” He looked again at the Doctor. “Do you need…help…with any of that?”

“No, I think that’s just about everything.” The Doctor sat back on his haunches, admiring his handiwork. The blanket seemed to have grown in size to accommodate all the food and still leave room for the three friends to sit comfortably. “Well, come along then! You can’t expect me to eat this all by myself.”

“You can’t expect the three of us to _finish_ this all by ourselves,” Anji objected, cautiously sitting down on the edge of the blanket.

“Nibble,” the Doctor recommended. “We have all the time in the world.”

Fitz grabbed a plate and started digging in, not needing to be told twice. “Seriously, though,” he said as he grabbed a dollop of this, a handful of that. “What brought this on, Doctor?”

The Doctor shrugged. “I thought we all needed a holiday. A proper holiday.” He smiled a little as he watched Fitz go a bit wild over all the food available. “There’s beer in the last jug,” he added.

Fitz stopped and looked up at the Doctor with the widest eyes. Then he started grinning and laughing. “Alright, Doctor!”

“And there’s wine,” the Doctor turned back to Anji. “Relax. Really.”

She was still frowning, but at that she looked at him and grinned, suddenly. He grinned back, hopefully, and she took a plate.

“You’re going to make yourself sick,” she pointed out to Fitz.

“I’ll go behind that tree,” he pointed with a fork without even looking where he was pointing. “You won’t have to watch.”

“Oh, thank you so much for that,” she groused good-naturedly. “Now I’m _really_ not going to eat much.”

The Doctor waited until both his friends had filled their plates before he fetched some food for himself. “Did you make all this?” Anji asked after a moment or three of silent and appreciative chewing. Fitz was keeping the jug of beer right by him. Anji just had a single, half-full glass of red, a decent chianti.

The Doctor nodded. “Yes, most of it. The TARDIS did the rest.”

“Thank you,” Anji said after another pause. She met the Doctor’s glance seriously. “Really. It’s lovely.”

“Yeah.” Fitz held up his stein (he had wanted to ask about that, but then decided that of all the odd things the Doctor had pulled today, a beer stein was probably one of the smaller oddities). “Chin chin.”

His two friends held up their own glasses, and they ceremoniously clinked before taking a swallow each. The Doctor had packed ginger beer for himself. Fitz was secretly charmed by that.

The three friends ate their fill, and Anji insisted she and Fitz pack up the dirty dishes and wrap up the leftover food, since the Doctor had gone to all the trouble of doing this for them. The Doctor relented and lay back on the blanket, closing his eyes and almost instantly falling asleep. The two companions kept glancing at him occasionally as they cleaned up and paused to drink more beer or wine, or just to admire the view. 

“He’s alright,” Fitz said quietly after one such casual check-in. 

“Isn’t he always?” Anji asked, precariously stacking bowls on top of plates.

“He’s not the same,” Fitz insisted. “A lot’s changed since I first met him.” Anji nodded, not looking up from her dirty dishes. He’d been saying that ever since she first ran into the pair of them, but how would she know? She didn’t have this deep and obscure history with the man that Fitz seemed to have. “But he’s still himself. He’s alright,” he added, more softly.

They were an odd pair, Anji had decided a long time ago, back when Dave was still alive. They were an odd pair but she’d gotten to know them and like them. She could never have handled travelling with the Doctor without Fitz.

They wrapped up their cleaning, sat down a while to rest and nurse their drinks and chat about nothing. The sun began to set exactly when the Doctor said it would, and they both laughed over that. Anji drained the last of the bottle of wine and stood up, only a trifle clumsily. “I’m going to take some of these things back into the TARDIS,” she said. “You coming?”

“In a minute,” Fitz said. “I’ll wake up the Doctor; he’ll probably want to see the sunset.”

Anji carefully picked up a tray they’d piled with most of the dirty dishes. She paused and looked down at the sleeping Doctor. “It’s always so odd to see him sleeping,” she said. “I suppose because he’s usually so full of energy.”

“He didn’t use to sleep this much.” Fitz sounded a trifle mournful. It might have been the beer.

Anji gave them both one last look and turned around, heading for the TARDIS. 

Fitz stared into the distance, holding his stein in one hand. The sky was turning from a pale, perfect blue into reds and golds and oranges and purples. He really should wake the Doctor.

Looking down at the ground by the edge of their blanket, he noticed a little yellow wildflower for the first time. He wondered if it had a name, if anybody had ever come to this planet other than the Doctor and whoever he decided to bring with him. Fitz plucked the little flower, drained the last of his beer, and turned to survey the Doctor.

He looked very peaceful, lying on the blanket. Not like a madcap adventurer, out to right the wrongs of the universe. Fitz half-smiled. It really was good to be the Doctor’s friend.

He crawled across the blanket to his friend—standing up and walking just to kneel down again seemed like far too much effort this late in the day—and brushed the little yellow wildflower over the tip of the Doctor’s nose. He swept it up the bridge of his nose, traced his eyebrows, and was just heading for the hairline when the Doctor blinked his eyes open and brought his hand up to grasp Fitz’s.

“Sorry,” Fitz said apologetically. “Thought I should wake you somehow, but I didn’t want to be mean about it. Anji’s packing things up, and I thought you’d want to see the sunset, since you seem to like them so much.”

He wondered if he was protesting too much.

The Doctor sat up, and Fitz settled back so that he wasn’t quite in so much of the Doctor’s space. The Doctor let go of Fitz’s hand but kept hold of the flower. He looked at it closely for a long minute, just as twilight darkened into dusk.

“Doctor?” Fitz asked worriedly.

“I dreamt,” the Doctor said abruptly, and Fitz could just make out his pale face and blue eyes in the last of the light. 

“Oh?” Fitz said when the Doctor didn’t seem about to go on. “Good dream, was it?”

“It involved a hermit,” said the Doctor, in a faraway voice. “Or at least, I think it did.”

Fitz blinked. “A hermit,” he repeated. “I don’t think I’ve met many of those.”

“Well, you’re not very likely to, are you?” replied the Doctor. “Stands to reason.” He stood up, suddenly, and Fitz stumbled upward after him. “Anji’s got the dirty dishes, has she?” the Doctor seemed to be surveying what was left on their blanket. “Excellent. We should help her with those.”

“We should get the rest of this stuff inside first,” Fitz pointed out, “before it gets completely dark and we can’t see a thing.”

The Doctor stuck his little yellow flower into his frockcoat lapel jauntily; it stood out as a bright little spark against the dark. “Right then,” he said, and Fitz could hear the grin in his voice, “I’ll get the basket, you get the blanket.”

For a long time afterward, Fitz would say that was one of the better days of his life.

 

END


End file.
